Lili Dujourie

Pepe Espaliil

Cristina Iglesias
n curated by john

h b

upported by The Arts Cou

bl

Ch

Murphy

G ll ry L

gl

Lili Dujourie
Pepe Espaliu

Cristina Iglesias
An exhibition curated by

Chisenhale Gallery, London

1.3

September

john Murphy

- 2.9 October |995

Chisenhale Gallery, Michael Newman,

Dujourie, Cristina Iglesias and

the estate of Pepe Espaliu
Lili

Published by Chisenhale Gallery, London

Edited by Sue jones

Catalogue designed by Martin Brown

Photographs by Hugo Glendinning
Printed by The White Dove Press
Chisenhale Gallery
64 Chisenhale Road

London

E3 SQZ

TlOl8I98| 4518
Fax

Supported by

ot8t 980 7169

The London Arts Board

Arts Council of England
The Ministrie van de Vlaamse Gemeenschap
European Commission Kaleidoscope Fund

Cultural Office ofthe Spanish Embassy

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the following individuals

for their encouragement, advice and practical

assistance, without which this exhibition would

not have been possible.

Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton, Martin Brown, Pepe Cobo,

Darbyshire Framemakers, Damaso de Lario, Alice Evans
Alexandra Flood, Susanna Greeves,joav Hessayon,
Xavier Hufkens, jonathan juniper, james Lavender,
jane Leighton, Rachel Lichtenstein, Kyoko Mizuno,
jacques Nimki, Emily Pringle, Robert Rogers,
Signe Rosenkjaer, Kerri Sellens,jonathan Watkins,
Helen Weddell, johan Witdouck
ISBN

CH|SE|\I|-1/-\LE

901066 oz

Some Notes
on

Nothing,

and the

Silence of
Works of Art

Consider a monochrome painting as an object that is supposed to represent nothing. However much
the viewer desires to see nothing, or at least an undifferentiated optical field, attention soon settles
on the brush strokes, the weave of the canvas, the slightest modulation, whether intended or
accidental. One moment the absolute, the next sheer contingency; there is no third term, no way of
mediating between the two. That is what distinguishes the blackness of a black monochrome from
the black of certain Spanish paintings of the r7th century, where it is supposed to be God who
permits the mediation between something and nothing, and to whose gaze the painting is referred.

]uan Sanchez Cotans still lives could be interpreted in terms of creation ex nibilo. The fruit and
vegetables in Still Life with Quince, Cabbage, Melon and Cucumber are
arranged in a patabola slanting towards the viewers space as it moves
from left to right, from quince to cucumber, across the shallow ledge of
the cantarero, where the fruit is kept and hung from strings to preserve it.
Depth is also implied by a series of diagonals which follow the perfect

1. For discussion of Cotn's still lives,

see Martin S.Soria, Snchez Cotns
Quince, Cabbage, Me/on and Cucumber
Alt Quarterly, VIII, 1945, pp,225-230;
Numan Bryson, Looking at the
Over-looked: Four Essays on Still Life
Painting, London, Reaktion Books, 1990,
pp.63~7O; and the chapter 'Snchez Cotn
and Still-Life Painting in Toledo around
1600 in William B.Jordan and Peter
Cherry, Spanish Still Life; from Velzquez
tG
o uya, on on, Nt`
aiona a eya
Yale University Press, 1995, pp.27-35.

Ld

|GI|rnd

sphere of the quince - the lines of the cabbage leaf, the bisected melon and
its slice, the cucumber - and intersect the parabola, thus both separating
and linking two spaces: the space of everyday reality occupied by the
viewer, and the black nothingness behind. This black void renders the
fruit and vegetables at once intensely real - indeed hyper-real to the point
of trompe loeil - and unreal, phantasmatic. Removed from the circuit of
use and signification, they are rendered back to the void from which,
Cotan seems to be telling us, they came in the first place. The self-certainty
of the everyday is shaken. They, as we, are created beings, utterly
dependant on the creator and a part of a divine order which is at once
rational- as expressed through its rigorous underlying geometry - and yet
totally and utterly inscrutable. That the top of the internal frame formed
by the cantarero is missing opens the dimension of the blackness to the
infinite, to the unpresentable. In their asceticism, Cotans still lives do
penance for the presumption of recreating Gods creation, and seek to
avoid idolatry by excluding any image of man or God and by showing
the visual world to be an illusory veil cast over nothingness. However,
nothingness is not ultimate in such a painting, but rather appears within
the horizon of redemption. The difference of the sense of the nothingness
in Cotns still life from that of the black monochrome is between the
absent mediator and the absence of mediation.

humanism and of nihilism, the nothingness that Cotan represents

as beyond, and which has the same terrible yet redemptive character as
the blackness that highlights the crucified Christ in Zurbarans Crucifixion
(1627), has become immanent as the negativity of the subject. The mortal
human being, no longer able to identify with a place in the substantial
order of creation, came to be defined as in essence no substantial being:
not what it is, but that it is. However, for us even that positive
existential account of negativity is no longer tenable. When we try to
think the nothing, what we confront is not nihilation, our human thatness

In modernity, the epoch of

open possibility, but the un-negatable, the remainder - without the

unity or identity of a substance - that is left after every object has
been negated.
as

The crucial question that

raised is: How to make an art of an unmediated relation with alterity or

the outside, which is now to be figured - or we might have to say
dis-figured - as that which falls out of the circuit of relations, or
as that which, in the terms of an ontology of determinate objects, would
be nothing?

is

II

Hegels account of the story of Pompeys entry into the Jewish Holy of Holies in jerusalem offers a
critique which may be extended from the negative theology which he has
in mind to the modern art of nothingness, at which point the limits of that
critique itself become apparent. The story, as recounted in Hegels early
theological writings, goes as follows:

After Pompey had approached the heart of the temple, the centre of adoration, and had hoped
to discover in it the root of the national spirit, to find indeed in one central point the life-giving soul
of this remarkable people, to gaze on a Being as an object for his devotion, on something significant
for his veneration, he might well have been astonished on entering the arcanum to find himself
deceived so far as some of his expectations were concerned, and, for the rest, to find himself in an
empty room.
criticising this sublime emptiness as based on an abstract, unmediated opposition
of God as the infinite subject on the one hand, and everything visible or
actual on the other: The infinite subject had to be invisible, since everything visible is something restricted. Hence the commandment against
idolatry, since an image of God was just stone or wood to them," rather
than a sensuous embodiment of the idea. Clearly we are intended to think
that Pompey assumed that in the heart of the temple he would find an
2.@,w_aHege|,ra,/y Theological wfffmgs,
idol, something like a statue or an image; emptiness here is not nothing
`,U'
,`|fM.K
,Pfl'|
but the experience of an expectation unfulfilled - and had he reflected
gy|vanaiess,'i9h19fVe'$"y
3.|bid.,p,19l.
on this, we might say, what Pompey would have encountered is his own
4.|bid.,p.192.
temporal experience of anticipation.
Hegel, of course,

is

Cl

Hegel is not advocating idolatry, at least not in any simple sense, but rather is implying that, if all
embodiment - therefore mediation - of spirit is refused, then the dialectic
of reciprocity will be blocked and the differential identity of subject and
object, the absolute knowing with which the Phenomenology concludes,
will never be attained. For classical art, which is for Hegel a limited and
surpassed moment, the figure of this reciprocity is the exchange of the
gaze: if the eyes are the window of the soul, then a fully spiritualised
world would be one that returns the gaze, that becomes all eyes; in his
5. G.W,EHege|, Aesthetics; Lectures
Fff1EAll,(YB|1S.IM.Kl1OX,OXf0fd,0Xf0Yd
Lectures on Fine Art, Hegel speaks of the eyes of which all points in
`tyP
,1975, .l54.l!l`|
the phenomenal world are to become. In other words, in Pompeys
RLf$cffff=halfef@ne_ an
on

encounter Hegel has set up an opposition of emptiness and idol, and

has done so only to throw into question the abstractness of this opposition, wherein each term is itself based on an opposition in which truth is
set up over and against the subject. Hegel goes on to identify precisely the
paradox of this empty Holy of Holies:
Though there was no concrete shape to be an object of religious feeling, devotion and reverence for
an invisible object had none the less to be given direction and a boundary inclusive of the object.
In
e.

other words, the infinite subject, which could not be represented in an image without relativising
God, had none the less, as an object of devotion, to be circumscribed in
some way.

isa

However, could we not say that the temple is constructed precisely to contain neither an object, not
the absence of objects, but rather what might be called a non-object?
This non-object circumscribed by the temple would have the structure of
an extimate absolute, that is to say, something absolved from relations
with anything else, an outside in the most radical sense, beyond any possible horizon, which is none the less contained on the inside, at once, to
1. Iamgratefulto Ma'<c<>usmsf.>f
take the same example .Hegel uses, giving a people their consistency, their
,
these distinctions, which he made during
identity, and yet rupturing any closure in terms of the national spirit, the
a|iufeaheimhatema|A0iaiQn
.
relation
the account negation
mpsychoanaiysis,
representation of which Pompey expects to find in the temple.

in

to

oi

The temporal experience of the encounter with this alterity would be, precisely, not anticipation
which knows in advance, but rather a waiting without anticipation, a passivity that is not a deficient form of activity. Through this story, Hegel has
included within his dialectical account of the development of Christianity
an intimation of precisely the notion of the absolute as radical outside,
transcendence, that will become the alternative for a number of thinkers
to his own immanent conception of the absolute as that which includes
all mediations. However Hegel has also foretold what will come to be
the problem for such an approach to the absolute, which is that of what
kind of relation may be entertained with the non-relational. How can the
infinite object be circumscribed without being mediated and thereby
relativized, thus losing its absoluteness?
III

This distinction between the nothingness of transcendence and a blackness which holds the place of
that which resists negation may become clearer when the blackness in
Cotans still lives is compared with that in certain paintings by Magritte.
Cf La lunette dapproc/ve (1963 ), where through a window pane we see
a blue sky with white clouds, while through the opening between the
window and its frame we see undifferentiated blackness, Slavoj Ziiek
writes as follows: the frame of the windowpane is the fantasy-frame
Slavoj iiiek, Tarrying with the Negative:
Kant, Hege/, andthe cfnfqueof/dec/ogy,
which constitutes reality, whereas through the crack we get an insight into
Durham, Duke University Press, 1993,
the impossible Real, the Thing-in-itself. This Real, an unsymbolized
p.103.
B.

9. This phrase comes from the poem

Terre sans nuage by Andr Bosmans
published in his book Le Soc/e de nuit,
Ververs, Temps Mls, 1961, Magritte
to his friend Bosmans on 23rd July,
to congratulate him on the line
neant est le seul merveille du monde
(Nothingness is the one and only wonder
ofthe world) Lettres a Andr Bosmans,
ed. Francine Perceval, Brussels, Editions
Seghers, 1990, p.14. Cf, Sarah Whitfield,
Magritte, London, The South Bank Centre,
1992, catalogue entry no. 122 on La
lunette d'approche, where she also cites
the comparison of the painting with Marcel
Duchamps Fresh widow, 1920, made by
Suzi Gablik, Magritte, London, Thames

wrote

1958

l.e

am Hmm'

It

is

m'`97`

- therefore impossible - remainder, renders everyday reality unreal, yet

from the point of view of symbolically framed reality, can only appear as
nothing or an empty place. The Real falls out of the frame of reality, or
seeps through its cracks, yet at the same time it is precisely that which
gives reality its consistency as a cathected substitute for that which is
desired yet forbidden. The title of Magrittes painting translates to The
field-glass, sugesting that the visible itself is a kind of prosthesis, a standin for nothingness, the one and only wonder of the world. Its effect is to
remind us that representations are substitutes for an unrepresentable
object-cause of desire, the Thing, and that the only way in which such a
Thing shows itself is through its representatives.

in terms of this structure that jacques Lacan develops a theory of art as sublimation. In his

Seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, after considering an anamorphic

mural in a monastery of the Minim order, and Neolithic cave painting,
he states:

In the same way that the exercise on the wall consists in fixing the invisible inhabitant of the
cavern, we see the link forged between the temple, as a construction around emptiness that
designates the place of the Thing, to the figuration of emptiness on the walls of this emptiness itselfto the extent that painting progressively learns to master this emptiness, to take such a tight hold of
it that painting becomes dedicated to Hxing it in the form of the illusion of space."

From the account of the representation of space as aimed not towards the creation of an illusion
of reality but towards the figuration of emptiness, Lacan moves towards
w_ Jacque. tam, The Seminarof
Jacques Lacan: Book
The Ethics
a theory of mimesis in which the imitation of the object IS by no means
0/Psycnoana/ysf1959_19eo,e_
.

V//;

Jacques-Alain

Miller,

trans. Dennis Porter,

New york, w_w_N0n0n, 1992, p.140.

ultlmatfl:

Of course, works of art imitate the objects they represent, but their end is certainly not to represent
them. In offering the imitation of an object, they make something different out of that object. Thus
they only pretend to imitate. The object is established in a certain relationship to the Thing and is
intended to encircle and to render both present and absent."
The imitation of the object in a painting is not simply a convincing representation, but a way of
engaging the viewers desire for something that lies behind the object
depicted, some thing that cannot itself be represented. It is by provoking
this desire that in the Classical story Parrhasios defeats Zeuxis by painting
not grapes so convincing that they attract the birds, but a veil or curtain
11. lbid., p.141.
so lifelike that his competitor asks W/ell, and now show us what you have
Four Fundamental
12. Jacques Lacan,
painted behind it. But if we are to suppose that there is nothing behind
Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans.
Sheridan, New York, W.W.Norton, 1978,
other than the desire to see what is behind, what is to prevent this collapsp.103: Lacan calls Parrhasios's victory
triumph the gaze over the eye; that is,
is
properly
human
as
a
function
ing into the mere reiteration of reciprocity, where the subject ultimately
vision that
desire and drive, rather than
recognises the object outside itself as its own work, its pro-ject?
a reflex
instinct.
The

Alan

of

A
a

of

of

It

is

that desire involves the desire to occupy a position from which the subject as subject is excluded,
which means that the relation of the subject to this object is radically
asymmetrical. What Lacan calls the Thing, the object-cause of desire for
IO

13. Lacan,

The

Ethics of Psychoanalysis,

p. 129-30.

14. Lacan includes the nothing among the

list of ob/ets petit a; the mamilla, faeces,
the phallus (imaginary object), the urinary
flow. (An unthinkable list, if one adds, as
do, the phoneme, the gaze, the voice -the
nothing.) Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan
Sheridan, New York, W.W.Norton, 1977,
p.315. Notice that, separated by a dash
from the other objects ofthe drive, the
nothing has an ambiguous status, both
inside and outside the series, between
the objects and the Thing, perhaps, just
as it does in Heidegger between beings
and Being.

which all actual desired objects are substitutes, that inaccessible Thing
behind the lack that makes possible objects, Will always be represented by
emptiness, precisely because it cannot be represented by anything else - or,
more exactly, because it can only be represented by something else. But in
every form of sublimation, emptiness is determinativef" Notice that for
Lacan emptiness or the nothing is not ultimate, but is itself a substitute
object," which at once holds the place of the Thing, and keeps the Thing
at a distance from the subject, protects the subject from that which is too
much, that which exceeds the subjects capacity to bear. Such an account
recalls the early Christian defence of the image by Origen:

through the splendour of the image we may grasp Gods glory which, like the source of light, may
not be regarded directly, but only through a glass, darkly."
In a similar way, Dionysius Areopagita gave a positive account of the veils that cover Gods pure
appearance as making`possible the divine revelation, both by attenuating
the unbearable light radiating from the divine source, while at the same
time inciting the viewer to go beyond the image." In the theory of the
icon, the power of the image comes to be interpreted in terms of a systematic account of desire. To return to Lacan, who perhaps remains more of a
Christian thinker than one might expect, without this distance the subject
would be abolished in, would fade into, the object of desire, a danger Hgured experientially in anxious images of formless life substance, slime,
15. That this Lacans dehnition
beauty
teeming insect life, all that which cannot be kept at a distance because
was discussed by Philippe van Haute at a
Pub|icLecture ofthe Slade Centre for the
without the boundaries of a determinate object, or, for Levinas and
History and Theory
at UCL on 18th
1995.
Blanchot, the unsilencable murmuring of the bare there is (il y a) heard in
October
16.
Moshe Barasch, lcon: Studies
the black night of insomnia. Here we may glimpse the limitation of
the History an Idea, New York, New
philosophies which valorize nothingness as ultimate: nothingness becomes
University Press, 1992, pp,136-8.
17. Cf. lbld., |J|J.172-6.
a defence against- a way of distancing - something even more terrifying.
of

is

of Art

in

Cl.

of

York

IV

While Lacans accoun t of art as the circumscription of emptiness may remind us of Hegels description of Pompeys experience at the Holy of Holies, the source that he
explicitly points to is Heideggers essay The Thing. We will have to consider whether the philosophers thinking of negativity as concealment and
withdrawal corresponds to Lacans interest in extimity, in the outside on
the inside of the subject, whether Lacans nothingness is the same as
18. Martin Heidegger, Poet/ya Language,
Heideggers. Heidegger develops his account of the essence of the thing
Thought, trans.A|bert Hofstadter, New
York, Harper Colophon Books, 1971,
p.169.
through a description of a potter making a jug, of which he writes,

The potter (___) shapes the void. For it, in it, and out of it, he forms the clay into the form (...). The
jugs void determines all the handling in the process of making the vessel. The vessels thingness does
not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that it holds.
The point of this description

is

to indicate a nothing that is not negation, as it has been understood

tradition based on the primacy of the presence of entities, where

by the

II

nothing is the negation of a present being. Heidegger evokes, rather, the

primacy of a productive nothingness, of a nothing that makes possible the
thing, that makes it possible for a thing to come into presence around it.
Nothing, in this case, stands for Being as different from beings, without
serving as the negation of beings. Let us now listen to Lacans creative
repetition, in which he translates the jug as (1/lS,,'9of which he says,
It creates the void and thereby introduces the possibility of filling it. Emptiness and fullness are
introduced into a world that by itself knows not of them. It is on the basis of this fabricated signifier,
this vase, that emptiness and fullness as such enter the world, neither more nor less, and with the
same sense."
And a little later, to remain with Lacan:

Now if you consider the vase (...) as an object made to represent the existence of the emptiness at the
centre of the real that is called the Thing, this emptiness as represented in the representation presents
itself as a niloil, as nothing. And that is why the potter, just like you to whom I am speaking, creates
the vase with his hand around this emptiness, creates it, just like the mythical creator, ex nihilo,
starting with a hole."
The introduction of emptiness into a world that knows not of it sounds remarkably like the nihilation, the hole in being, that, according to Sartre, the pour soi, self-consciousness, introduces into the en soi, brute being; except that the nothing
is not introduced into being by the subject in Lacan, but by the signiiier. In
contrast with Sartre, both Heidegger and Lacan in their different ways
avoid subjective voluntarism, which derives from the scholastic doctrine
of Divine voluntarism, which is in turn linked to the notion of creation ex
ni/vilo, since it emphasized the inscrutibility of Gods will, its impenetrability by human reason, just as there is nothing outside or before God to provide grounds for creation. The opacity of the act of the artist as genius,
which Kant evokes in the Critique ofjudgment when he attributes the
source of genius to a gift of nature, could be seen as a rendering immanent of Divine voluntarism while in the very same move displacing
the source from the subject, thus anticipating Heideggers philosophy
of being."

attempting to convey the sense of the Thing in his seventh seminar, before turning to Heideggers
essay Lacan had described the wartime collection of matchboxes of his
19. Possibly allusion
the vase
flowers his Optical schema for the
friend, the poet jacques Prvert, where a line of matchboxes snaking
theory
narcissism
The Seminar
of Jacques Lacan; Book
The Ego
around the room was created by inserting the draw of one box into the
Freud's Theory and
the Technique of
Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955, ed. Jacques
next, suggesting a copulatory movement, but by drawers which are
Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli,
Cambridge University Press, 1988,
empty: The wholly gratuitous, proliferating, superfluous, and quasi
109. The discussion concerns man as
the vanishing point science which Lacan
absurd character of this collection pointed to its thingness as match box."3
connects both
Freud`s navel
the
dream as 'an absolutely incomprehensible
This essential emptiness of the collection is taken further in Lacans evocapoint' and 'being' as that point which
cannot be grasped the phenomenon,
tion of the masturbatory image of the potter with his hand around this
the point where the relation ofthe subject
the symbolic surtacesf (p. 105) what
emptiness, which is supposed to imply that the signifier is to be equated
perceived
the subject
a memorial
hallucination (p.11O) its reality-effect
with the phallus as that which does not exist, but rather is always already
In

in

to

of

in

in

of

in

/I;

in

p.

of

to

of

to

in

to

is

If

by

is

is

I2

sustained by the way in which alienation

in the imaginaw is anchored in the
symbolic order, by the big Other that makes
it possible to say the world is as it appears:
Man gets to see this reflection from the
point of view of the other. He is an other for
himself. This is what gives you the illusion
that consciousness is transparent to itself.
We arent present, in the reflection; to see
the reflection, we are in the consciousness
of the othen (p. 1 12) The Cartesian
undercurrent should be obvious, the
Heideggerian may be less so; man is
in between alienation into objects or
entities and fading into non-objective
being. Howeven and here the difference
with Heidegger lies, being is in Lacan
interpreted in relation to desire rather
than disclosure and temporality, and
therefore either radicalized, or recuperated
into subjectivity, depending on the
commitment of the critic.

lost, thereby introducing an emptiness or lack into being, which will make
possible the network of relations that will constitute the Symbolic Order,
together with a compensatory Imaginary fantasy of fullness. Implicitly,
Heideggers nothing is being interpreted, in terms of the genesis of the
subject (rather than the Dasein), as primary repression, where the hole in
the Symbolic that is created by an inaccessible signifier comes to stand for
the finitude of any order, which opens it up both to the Real- which we
have seen leaking around the window frame in Magrittes painting - and
to the necessity of imaginarization," of giving-body to the hole, as the
potter does, in such a way that it is not merely reduced to the image as a
specular substitute. Art, then, is not simply the attempt to convincingly
represent objects, which would be to pander to the egos Imaginary phantasy of fullness or completion, but rather to circumscribe the place of the
lost object in the Real, which is where the Real, which knows no lack or
emptiness, suffers from the signiIier.

Although subjectivity would be decentred in this account, as it is also for Heidegger where the finitude of the Dasein means that it exists in relation to that which it cannot
appropriate, its being-towards-death, and through that non-relation
arises the possibility of a relation with Being itself, the psychoanalytic
philosophy of the subject pursued by Lacan, inseparable from the
accounts of repression, denial and disavowal in relation to the Law of the
Father, is not identical with Heideggers aim, which is to think Being itself
as Being, in its sense as verb, and not in terms of the substantive, nominal
being of the entity. Heideggers primary concern is with the articulation of
a movement of presencing as disclosure that would not be the permanent
presence of metaphysics. Rather than the supposed transparency or complete yielding to the theoretical gaze of the object of knowledge according
to metaphysics, the finite coming-into-presence of things, according to
Heidegger, involves a withdrawal or concealment which cannot be overcome since it is constitutive. Things depend on a horizon in which to
zo. mia., p.12o_
appear, and every horizon, for Heidegger, is finite and historical; things
21. |bid.,p.121.
are granted to experience in a finite order, without the overview of a cos22. For the link between Kant and
motheoros, dependant on a concealment that cannot be overcome withHeidegger, see J.M.Bernstein,
Fate
of Art: Aesthetic Al/enation from Kant
Derrida and Adorno, Cambridge, Polity
out the installation of a new concealment. If all appearing is finite, the
Press, 1992, chapter 2, The Genius
radiance (Schein) of things, their appearing as the things that they are, can
Being: Heideggers The Origin
the
Work
Art",' pp.66-135.
no longer be thought under the opposition of illusion and reality, but
23. Lacan,
Ethics of Psychoanalysis,
p_114.
rather in terms of a withholding or reserve involved in any revelation or
donation, the concealment in unconcealment. Instead of completely
24. Philippe Julien, Jacques Lacans
Return
Freud:
real, the symbolic
occluding or forgetting this nothing, the concealment or withdrawal in
and the imaginary, trans. Devra Beck
Simiu, New
and London, New
University Press, 1994, pp.B7-89.
presencing, the account of the jug will show how the gift or outpouring
172- 94.
that is presencing is dependant on a keeping or retaining, a reticence, and
25. This developed
Lacan
The
1/ice 1/ersa. The movement between the two - pouring forth and withholdFour Fundamental Concepts of PsychoAnalysis,
the discussions
Holpeins
ing - takes place though the hollow of the jug.
painting The Ambassadors (pp.85-90).
The

to

of

of

of

The

Cf

to

The

York

York

is

in

by

in

of

As a thing the jug gathers and allows the mutual appropriation of those elements or dimensions that

make presencing possible, one of which

I3

is

that of human beings

as mortal:

Death is the shrine of Nothing, that is, of that which in every respect is never something that merely
exists, but which nevertheless presences, even as the mystery of Being itself. As the shrine of
Nothing, death harbours within itself the presencing of Being. As the shrine of Nothing, death is the
shelter of Being.

Human beings do not, here, carry death within themselves as the power of negation, as they do for
Hegel and Sartre, but rather the mortal has an essential relation to death
as that which is outside his or her power, as something in them that
cannot be appropriated in the form of a being or entity but which would,
insofar as thinking remains bound to entities, be rather nothing.Through
the impossible relation with their death, mortals become open to alterity.
The emptiness of the nothing has now become the shelter of Being in two
ways. First, Being is not a being, but rather that which makes possible the
disclosure of beings, so from the point of view of the totality of beings,
Being would be nothing. Second, since Being - in its verbal sense of
presencing - would involve an irreducible nothingness, a concealment or
26. Martin Heidegger,
Language,
fhought, trans. Albert Hoistadter, New
withdrawal, which the Very presence that it makes possible conceals,
Harper&
1975, pp.178-79.
the nothing, see also What
presence thus becomes the concealment of concealment, giving rise to an
Metaphysics?
Martin Heidegger, Basic
Writings,
David Farell Krell, London,
ontology of the object and the subject. In terms of the history of Being,
Routledge, revised edition 1993.
cu
Nothing is a title for Being in the time of the oblivion of Being. If
27. Robert Bernascuni, The Question of
Language Heideggefs History of Being,
everything one can recognise remains a being, then Being itself, which is
Atlantic Highlands, Humanities Press,
1985, p_56.
not a being, an entity, is experienced as nothing.
Poetryg

Row,

York,

On

is

in

ed.

in

To equate the withdrawal (Entzug) of being with a blind spot, as it is tempting to do when one is in

search of a concrete example of how this withdrawal might be experienced, is to reinscribe the philosophy of being in the philosophy of the
subject. Heideggers concern with the nothing is with the difference
between Being and beings, and with the withdrawal in any coming into
presence, whereas Lacans is with the prohibited absolute object of the
desiring, therefore divided, sexual subject. While Being intrinsically
involves nothingness for Heidegger, since any manifestation must involve
a concealment, any giving a withholding, any presence an absence, for
Lacan it is rather the law of the signifier - prohibition rather than an
originary difference -that makes emptiness and fullness as such enter the
world, the emptiness that is lack opening up both the endless chain of
Symbolic substitution of which the repressed signifiers constitute the inaccessible meaning, and the illusory Imaginary fullness of being that the
subject will thereafter pursue. Despite this dissimilarity, however, what the
two thinkers have in common is a preoccupation with finitude, and therefore negativity in relation to time, whether this is thought in terms of lack
and traumatic aprs coup, or an original withdrawal or privation as the
temporal condition of the entwinement of human being and Being itself.
The difference, perhaps, could be indicated as that between the anxiety of
being-towards-death, which remains productive, issuing in a relation to
the proper or the ownmost, and the absolute destitution of a trauma in

I4

The Ethics ol
Psychoanalysis, p.13O.

28. Lacan,

29. BernasccniThe Question

op. cit. pp.56-57,

of

Language.)

relation to which the only means of survival is defence. The problem,

then, from a Lacanian perspective, for an art which seeks to transgress the
prohibition of images without regressing to the mere misrecognition of
the Imaginary, would be to combine the necessary defence with the risk
of a relation with the Thing, the ultimate c_ause of desire and the Death
Drive. This would be a point, perhaps, at which beauty and the sublime
could no longer be categorically distinguished. It would also be an art
where emptiness is determinative, which is Lacans rigorous determination of sublimation.

For Lacan, the blind spot stands for the enigma that the desiring subject is for itself as the place of
the (non-human) Other where language, as the unconscious, speaks. Here
the philosophy of the subject approaches, once again, the philosophy of
30.
Mary Vidal, Watteau's Painted
Conversations, New Haven and London,
Being: for Heidegger, silence, including the loss of speech in anxiety, is
Yale University Press, 1992. See also
the chapter
with both the absence of the word and with the reserve of
Watteau and Reverie
equi-primordial
Norman Bryson, Word and Image;
French Painting of the Ancien Regime,
being as originary difference. The nothing corresponds to the thinkers
Cambridge, Cambrldge University Press.
1981, pp.58-88, where he claims that
experience of the lack of a word for Being,": this lack shows up the
the Watteau-effect consists
the creation
ofa semantic vacuum which the viewer
words as words for Being, thus marking a caesura in, if not the end of, the
'tries
(...) with an inrush verbal
reverie' (p.74), and he goes
write,
history of Being. Similarly, we might say that the coming into presence
'(.,.) Watteau sunders the link between
signifier and signified (,..). The meanings
involved in the work of art differs from that of other things in the world in
Watteau, having no signiiier pin them
down, are experienced mysteriously, as
that it intimates the reserve or withdrawal, the nothingness and death,
moods, or atmospheres' (p,88). Whereas
for Vidal the signiied
Watteaus paintings
which makes possible any world in the Hrst place. This is the source of the
would be, not a topic, but conversation
itself, reflected
the materiality ofthe
fragility and pathos of certain works of art - one thinks here of the paintsignifier, the artful informality
the brushings of Watteau that are themselves based upon and seek to figure forth
strokes. am inclined think that both are
right, since the very emphasis
conversation stresses the silence ofthe painting,
the art of conversation, or the sculptures of Giacometti - in which the
and
extension the traditional visual
arts.
its negative form, as contrary
visual world or the figure seems to withdraw in the very artistic perfora fullness
presence promised bythe
tradition, this silence is apprehended
mance in which it is given. Silence no longer supports the fullness of visias melancholy. Bryson writes:
the
melancholic gaze, the world
longer
ble being, but makes it tremble and erodes it. More than the visual
apprehended as sufficient- as completed
presence; something missing, but
metaphor of the blind spot, the thinking of withdrawal in terms of silence
what can never be named, because is,
precisely, absence (p.7O-71).
draws attention to a mortal temporality.
Cf.

on

in

in

to fill

of

on to

in

to

of

in

of

to

on

by

of

to

In

of

ln

is

no

is

it

The finitude of the visual arts is felt nowhere more than in their silence. There is something in the
work that is not a being, and that cannot be named, but which thereby
draws forth discourse by its very secrecy. Arts modernity begins, perhaps,
when certain works, rather than seeking to overcome this condition, thus
positing it as a deficiency in the attempt to make pictures and statues
speak, begin to thematize silence as an essential condition, and thereby
court the risk of oblivion, of falling silent themselves, dissolving into nothing. We need not think of this beginning in terms of a historicist linear
sequence of movements, since it has always echoed in its own occlusions.
Courting oxymoron, we could call it an historical origin, a transcendental
condition that emerges in a moment of the history of art and literature. In
order to be an origin such works depend upon a performative which they
seek to embody. What they enact is the declaration of their own condition
of possibility. Thus they depend upon being preceded by that which they
create; and on creating that which precedes them. Their temporality
is thus, to say the least, paradoxical, and is approached by the future

15

anterior of the will have been. But this future anterior indicates precisely
the problem of closure that the work faces with respect to the performative that enunciates the law of its being. The performative, at the level of
the law, ties a past that was never present, and therefore that precisely was
not anterior, with a messianic future of the other. The work, which necessarily as a work takes a concrete form, imposes a closure on the performative, and does so by assuming a mimetic relation to its condition of
possibility. Creation ex nihilo becomes the mimesis of creation itself,
which can only be sustained as creation against reification by destruction.
From a Hegelian perspective, this would be to repeat the intrinsic connection of abstract negation with terror.
This is, of course, why the work must unWork itself. The movement of creation and destruction,
Romantic genesis pas excellence, is interrupted by the work which, like
Melvilles Bartleby who replies to any demand with the phrase I would
prefer not to, withdraws itself from the work of negation, and thus can
scarcely be thought of any more as a work. And because paintings and
sculptures do not speak, do not remove themselves in the way that the
other person exceeds any horizon by speaking, we are reminded of the
limit of the visual, or the non-visual condition of the visual, which is not,
either, simply discourse. While a certain silence may make possible the
formal closure of the work, and in addition give the illusion that a single
work of art can say everything that can be said, that it may finally form a
totality, silence may equally prevent the closure of the visual on itself insofar as it intimates an invisible reserve or outside that conditions the visual
by interrupting it. Thus the transition from everyday visual experience in
the world, where words are supposed to refer to things and sentences correspond with states of affairs, to the visuality of the world, where that
which is positively given is experienced in terms of a withdrawal or in
relation to an outside that is not given, may at least be hinted at in such
silence where the almost-non-object - manifest emptiness - comes to
figure, without figuring, the impossible relation to that which is Without
relation.
The emptiness and silence which necessarily characterise such an art evoke the anxiety from which,
in various ways in our everyday lives, we seek to defend ourselves. In their
self-exposure to the viewer, such works court these defenses, such as the
violence of a look that expects to be reflected back to itself in a pacifying
reciprocity. But perhaps the work in turn has its defenses, can resist the
gaze, when the mirror is broken, and the work, sheltering its alterity,
unworks itself, presents a blank face, or turns away.

16